Maybe he loved her. Maybe he loved her more than he loved me. And the last eight years? Maybe just a placeholder until he found her.
The dam broke.
My knees gave way, and I didn't try to catch myself. I slid down the front of the cabinets, hitting the floor hard, the cold tile biting into my legs.
The grief I had been holding back—the clean, noble grief of a widow—shattered, and something jagged and ugly took its place.
I pressed my palms into my eyes until stars exploded behind my lids, gasping for air that wouldn't come. I heard Ben move, his heavy boots on the floor.
He crouched down beside me but didn't touch me. He didn't try to hug me or shush me. He just sat there in the dust and the dark, bearing witness to the ruin his best friend had left behind.
"I'm sorry," he whispered into the dark. "I'm so sorry, Liv."
Chapter 9
Ben
The crying didn't stop all at once.
Olivia just... ran out of fuel.
One minute she was shaking against me, a small, violent vibration that rattled through the canvas of my work jacket, and the next, the tension simply left her body. She went slack.
"Olivia?"
My voice sounded too loud in the empty kitchen.
She didn't answer. Her forehead was pressed against my shoulder, her breathing hitching in small, shallow uneven rhythms. She had passed out.
I stayed frozen for a long moment, afraid that if I moved, the reality of the last hour would crash back down on her. I could feel the cold radiating off the tile floor, seeping through my jeans, but she felt fever-hot against me.
"Liv," I whispered.
Nothing.
I couldn't leave her here. But touching her—really touching her, not just offering a shoulder to cry on—felt like a violation of a treaty I’d signed with Ryan fifteen years ago. Abrother’s wife. Off limits. Sacred ground.
But Ryan wasn't here, was he? Ryan had burned the treaty.
I shifted my weight, sliding one arm under her knees and the other behind her back. I braced myself to lift, expecting the dead weight of grief, but when I stood up, she felt terrifyingly light. Frail, almost. Like the last week had hollowed her bones out.
Her head lolled back against my chest, her hair brushing against my chin. It smelled like vanilla and something clean and soft that cut right through the smell of drywall dust and whiskey.
I carried her out of the kitchen.
The hallway was a tunnel of shadows. My boots were heavy on the hardwood—thud, thud, thud—a clumsy sound in her quiet house. I tried to walk softer, but I was a bull in a china shop, carrying the most fragile thing in the world.
I stepped inside the bedroom and paused. It smelled like them. Laundry detergent, old cologne, and that faint, stale scent of sleep. The bed was made with hospital corners, the duvet smoothed flat. It looked like a museum exhibit.
I moved to the side that wasn't Ryan's.
I lowered Olivia down slowly, afraid she would wake up and realize who was holding her. But she just murmured something unintelligible and curled onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest.
I stood there, my hands hovering uselessly in the air. She was still wearing her shoes—loafers, sensible and neat.
I knelt at the foot of the bed, and my thick, calloused fingers felt clumsy as I untied the laces. I slipped the shoes off, one then the other, and set them side-by-side on the rug. Then I pulled the comforter up, tucking it around her shoulders.
She looked so small in the expanse of that mattress.
